Many computing environments may use replication as a strategy to ensure high availability, fault tolerance and other objectives. Frequently these computing environments will use one or more backup strategies to backup data replicated to a secondary node from a primary node. Backups may require a significant amount of resources and time. In an effort to minimize the amount of resources which may be required, some computing environments may utilize snapshots of secondary node data. Computing environments utilizing asynchronous replication write requests of data on a secondary node may significantly lag behind replication write requests on a primary node. This may be due to the difference in input/output (I/O) speed between an application, file system or other process writing data at a primary node and the speed of the network bandwidth between the primary node and the secondary node. Snapshots, copy on write (COW) processes or other backups may require synchronization of the backup storage and the storage to be backed up and/or copying of some or all of the data on a secondary node to other storage, such as a snapshot volume, prior to allowing replication writes to the secondary node to resume. This may further delay replication write requests from a primary node to a secondary node. The delays in replication writes may expose a computing environment using asynchronous replication and snapshots or other backup methods to an increased loss of data should a primary node fail. The delays in replication writes may also affect a primary node replication rate and primary node performance. The delays in replication writes may be more significant in space optimized snapshots wherein a secondary node may need to write to backup storage one or more storage blocks which may be changed due to a replication write request, prior to writing the replication data.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there may be significant problems and shortcomings associated with current backup technologies utilized on replication targets.